Water pollution causes extinction
Devitt et. al 19 (Tom Devitt, Assistant Professor of Practice, Research Scientist at University of Texas at Austin, Species delimitation in endangered groundwater salamanders: Implications for aquifer management and biodiversity conservation, PNAS, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1815014116#executive-summary-abstract, 1/14/19 – GM)
Global change driven by human population growth (131), agricultural expansion (132), and climate change (133, 134) is steadily increasing the demand for freshwater, compounding the severe water scarcity already faced by an estimated 4 billion people (135). Groundwater is critically important for human health and ecosystem functioning in many semiarid regions because of low rainfall, frequent droughts, and little permanent surface water. The conservation of groundwater biodiversity should be a low-cost by-product of water conservation programs (29), but groundwater depletion increasingly threatens biodiversity as well as the stability of aquatic, terrestrial, and subsurface ecosystems. Because most groundwater species are difficult to monitor, abundance declines are likely to go unnoticed until after populations have already been lost. Regional climate models that predict increased air temperature (136, 137), together with hydrologic models that project decreased springflow (119, 138, 139), predict that Edwards–Trinity Eurycea salamander populations and other codistributed groundwater-dependent species are highly vulnerable to extinction within the next century.